Well Friday was the end of PHP-CON, and for those of you would didn't have an opportunity to go you've missed out! From some really wonderful tutorials (I attended Zak's "MySQL and PHP for carbon based life forms" ) to some excellent sessions -- it was a great experience.
I arrived in NYC at around 8am on Weds (the first day of the conference).. Although I was tired, I did manage to get to Zak's tutorial. Although it was slow starting (technical difficulties) once it got rolling Zak ended up discussing just about everything when it came to MySQL. I was especially interested in things like Transactions (which are new to MySQL) and he did a great job there as well.
That night, Shane Caraveo took everyone (except Zeev and Sterling, they went somewhere else) out on the town to this nice Tex-Mex restruant he frequented when he lived here. Needless to say the food and company was excellent. Although I did threaten to blog about our after-hours adventures throughout the conference I won't to protect the guilty (hehe) :) Let's just leave it at we all had a good time.
The next day was the start of the actual conference.. All of the sponsors (Sams, PHP|A, Zend, HackerThreads and NYPHP) set up their respective booths, and the majority of the sessions were being held. My talk, which I will be putting online this weekend, was slated for 3:30. Everything went off without a hitch and I definately considered it a success. Along with my talk I went to George Schlossnagle's PHP Unit testing talk which was excellent.
For me, one of the biggest reasons I was looking forward to PHP-CON was my WiP (works in progress) session I was giving with Marco on PASM. I wasn't sure what type of response I was going to get, but was happy to see that we packed the room for our discussion! Unfortunately, technical difficulties with our network connection kept me from really showing off the abilities of PASM (which as really frusterating) but judging from the comments I recieved afterwards people in general were very impressed. Andrei and Sterling attended, and as I expected they were fairly critical of the entire concept judging by the tone of their questions. They expressed some very valid (although extremely premature) questions regarding some of the more dynamic qualities of PHP like dynamic variable names, eval code, etc. I do have possible solutions to these issues, however until the static portions of the PHP language are implemented within PASM I see little point in discussing it.
On Thursday night my editor Shelley (who is wonderful, by the way) took myself and all of the other Sams authors who were at the conference out to a wonderful steak dinner. Although the name of the restruant escapes me, it was some of the best steak I've ever had. Afterwards, about 12 of us all went out and found ourselves a nice Irish pub where we spent the rest of the night. Again, we all spent an excessive amount of money
On Friday the conference wrapped up with a closing Keynote by Zeev which basically served as a history lesson from PHP/FI 2 all the way to the current CVS of PHP5. Perhaps the most interesting portion of the Keynote was Zeev's claim that the PHP5 beta would be relased within "a few weeks". From what I have seen on the PHP Internals/PHP5-DEV lists however I don't see that one happening. But, you never know.
So that basically is a summary of what happened at this year's PHP-CON. If you haven't gone, or are thinking about going I highly recommend it. For those of you who are looking for the handout and slides from my Java/COM talk I will be posting them and they should be up by Monday.
Well Friday was the end of PHP-CON, and for those of you would didn't have an opportunity to go you've missed out! From some really wonderful tutorials (I attended Zak's "MySQL and PHP for carbon based life forms" ) to some excellent sessions -- it was a great experience.
I arrived in NYC at around 8am on Weds (the first day of the conference).. Although I was tired, I did manage to get to Zak's tutorial. Although it was slow starting (technical difficulties) once it got rolling Zak ended up discussing just about everything when it came to MySQL. I was especially interested in things like Transactions (which are new to MySQL) and he did a great job there as well.
That night, Shane Caraveo took everyone (except Zeev and Sterling, they went somewhere else) out on the town to this nice Tex-Mex restruant he frequented when he lived here. Needless to say the food and company was excellent. Although I did threaten to blog about our after-hours adventures throughout the conference I won't to protect the guilty (hehe) :) Let's just leave it at we all had a good time.
The next day was the start of the actual conference.. All of the sponsors (Sams, PHP|A, Zend, HackerThreads and NYPHP) set up their respective booths, and the majority of the sessions were being held. My talk, which I will be putting online this weekend, was slated for 3:30. Everything went off without a hitch and I definately considered it a success. Along with my talk I went to George Schlossnagle's PHP Unit testing talk which was excellent.
For me, one of the biggest reasons I was looking forward to PHP-CON was my WiP (works in progress) session I was giving with Marco on PASM. I wasn't sure what type of response I was going to get, but was happy to see that we packed the room for our discussion! Unfortunately, technical difficulties with our network connection kept me from really showing off the abilities of PASM (which as really frusterating) but judging from the comments I recieved afterwards people in general were very impressed. Andrei and Sterling attended, and as I expected they were fairly critical of the entire concept judging by the tone of their questions. They expressed some very valid (although extremely premature) questions regarding some of the more dynamic qualities of PHP like dynamic variable names, eval code, etc. I do have possible solutions to these issues, however until the static portions of the PHP language are implemented within PASM I see little point in discussing it.
On Thursday night my editor Shelley (who is wonderful, by the way) took myself and all of the other Sams authors who were at the conference out to a wonderful steak dinner. Although the name of the restruant escapes me, it was some of the best steak I've ever had. Afterwards, about 12 of us all went out and found ourselves a nice Irish pub where we spent the rest of the night. Again, we all spent an excessive amount of money
On Friday the conference wrapped up with a closing Keynote by Zeev which basically served as a history lesson from PHP/FI 2 all the way to the current CVS of PHP5. Perhaps the most interesting portion of the Keynote was Zeev's claim that the PHP5 beta would be relased within "a few weeks". From what I have seen on the PHP Internals/PHP5-DEV lists however I don't see that one happening. But, you never know.
So that basically is a summary of what happened at this year's PHP-CON. If you haven't gone, or are thinking about going I highly recommend it. For those of you who are looking for the handout and slides from my Java/COM talk I will be posting them and they should be up by Monday.
With PHP-CON East 2003 in NYC quickly approaching, I'm finding myself with less and less time to sleep! If you are planning on going to PHP-CON, be sure to check out my talk on using PHP's RPC (remote procedure calls) extension to allow PHP scripts to work with Java and COM classes.
Also, Marco and I will be taking an hour or two to discuss our PHP Compiler project. I have dubbed my PHP->ASM compiler PASM while Marco has yet to give his PHP->C compiler any sort of meaniful name (at least not that I've heard). Marco and I have been playing with this project for the past few months after we started discussing it -- but don't expect to see a full-functioning PHP compiler! This project is truly a work in progress :) Thus far I would not classify anything I can accomplish as any more than proof-of-concept, but I am looking forward to meeting up with Marco and anyone else interested -- see you there!
With PHP-CON East 2003 in NYC quickly approaching, I'm finding myself with less and less time to sleep! If you are planning on going to PHP-CON, be sure to check out my talk on using PHP's RPC (remote procedure calls) extension to allow PHP scripts to work with Java and COM classes.
Also, Marco and I will be taking an hour or two to discuss our PHP Compiler project. I have dubbed my PHP->ASM compiler PASM while Marco has yet to give his PHP->C compiler any sort of meaniful name (at least not that I've heard). Marco and I have been playing with this project for the past few months after we started discussing it -- but don't expect to see a full-functioning PHP compiler! This project is truly a work in progress :) Thus far I would not classify anything I can accomplish as any more than proof-of-concept, but I am looking forward to meeting up with Marco and anyone else interested -- see you there!
In response to some bugs that both I and some others found, I have released version 0.5b of PMM (PASM memory manager). This release fixes a number of issues involving references and I consider this much more stable than the previous version 0.3b.
PMM is released under GPL and can be found in the projects page.
(Side note: Although I did manage to fix some bugs in PMM, I haven't had much time to focus on PASM. I hope that early next-week I'll be able to put some time into it before I present it as a Work-in-Progress @ PHP-CON.)
In response to some bugs that both I and some others found, I have released version 0.5b of PMM (PASM memory manager). This release fixes a number of issues involving references and I consider this much more stable than the previous version 0.3b.
PMM is released under GPL and can be found in the projects page.
(Side note: Although I did manage to fix some bugs in PMM, I haven't had much time to focus on PASM. I hope that early next-week I'll be able to put some time into it before I present it as a Work-in-Progress @ PHP-CON.)
I've put together a patch for the current PHP5 HEAD that adds three new functions to the GD extension: imagecopyrotated(), imagesetclip(), and imagegetclip(). These functions are found in the GD lib version 2.0.12 but don't exist in the bundled PHP version until now. I haven't heard this patch being committed yet, but hopefully it will be.
The patch, examples, etc. can be found here.
